Cottage Industry: Tales from the Rural Laptop

Thursday, September 01, 2016

I recently had the incredible experience of having my first ever film screened on television. As a child of the 1970's, actual terrestrial broadcasting somehow retains its excitement for me, despite the fact that I now consider most of too lousy to actually watch. Despite all the catch-up online possibilities, there is something almost magical about the idea that the BBC has your film and has pressed play out NOW. For everyone to watch.
I was one of those kids that hankered after a personal connection to TV to an almost psychotic degree - I think it's the same for lots of people who grew up in provincial towns that felt as far from 'Broadcasting House' as Mars did. I tried to get my drawings onto Take Hart almost weekly, I was continuously writing into Jim'll Fix It, Swap Shop and the like. The zenith of this phase of my life was when I was runner-up in a Blue Peter competition to design a theme park, meaning I received the much coveted Blue Peter badge. A close second was having Noel Edmunds read out my letter live on air, suggesting improvements for litter bin design. (Well, I did grow up in a seaside town where beachside bins were big news).

So it was a huge delight to sit on a sofa in Paisley month ago with my siblings, nieces and nephew to watch 'The Closer We Get' go out to the nation on BBC2 Scotland. We were in high spirits, my sister had even baked the same cake that appears in the film, and though mass viewings of the film have happened often, we were still excited to be together on and off film. This was in many ways the culmination of over a year touring this 'family project', in cinemas, church halls and film festivals all over the world - talking to each new audience and sharing our story for so long has become second nature to me, so the surrealism of watching myself on TV felt only fleetingly like a weird dream. I think I did squeal when the serious - sounding BBC announcer read out my name though, and even the youngest in the room joined in the collective delight at each new on-screen appearance, whether it was a dog, a family member or a cake.

But someone important wasn't in that living room: my dad, Ian - arguably the star of the film, and a man who against all expectations has become as proud of the film as we all are, turning up at screenings and taking film critics' sterner judgements on his character squarely on the chin.

Dad was nearby though, in the big new hospital, having suffered what we now know to have been a stroke.
Like my mum Ann, he managed to walk into the hospital, and like her, it seems unlikely he will walk out. Also like her, a cascade of 'minor' NHS oversights came to tragic fruition in the stroke, perhaps this time round we will chase answers more vigorously, but it's too raw to think of all that yet.
Although a very different stroke from Mum's (affecting the opposite side of his body, and also his cognitive capacity) I find myself wishing I could un-know her five last years, return to the state of blind optimism I felt once, to encounter this vicious foe as if for the first time.

I attend a session of physiotherapy with Dad, a dogged and determined patient. I sit in front of him, bowed towards him at an encouraging distance - like a parent watching a toddler making its first staggering steps. His expression reminds me vividly of Mum's immediately after her stroke - they seemed to both age and become childlike at once. There is an open-ness in the face, a stare so penetrating you would feel it through walls. Two therapists support his lower body, a bench allows his one good side to balance. Instead of the stooped old man he was a few months ago (dreadful knees, despite the replacements) he is taller than he has been in years, his chin up, reminding me of his proud, knowing handsomeness in those black and white rugby team photographs from the '50s. But there is nothing of him in this stance, the women bear all his weight, and they shunt each foot in front of the other with a great effort, interspersing each 'step' with encouraging words.
The trio debrief, and when Dad's asked how much of the walking was 'down to him', he says 'Oh, probably most of it'. The therapists look down and say nothing.

In the 'team meeting' we are invited to later, various nurses join the physios, perched on desks in a tiny office, to summarise what is called, with a little embarrassment, 'progress'. There are no surprises. I look across at my sister and notice how young and old her fearful face looks.
There are no surprises.

Tuesday, January 19, 2016

....who - on a busy morning, at a busy station, at the busiest time, just before Christmas - walks purposefully into the shadows beyond the platform. He calmly removes his top and shoes, and throws himself under the oncoming train. Over their morning tea, his family hear news reports of a fatality causing commuter chaos. No-one thinks it's him.

In fact, X was roughly my age. But I knew him best some years ago, when we shared a flat, and even then he seemed so young, so - well - boyish. Thankfully, he never lost this quality. It was embodied in a kind of innocence, an inquisitiveness, and a wayward sense of mischief. Despite a fascination with deeply unfunny spiritual people such as Gurdjieff - and an occasional devotee of their practices - he was never remotely dour about his quest for enlightenment. He was - literally - a clown, a performer by trade, and my memories of life in that flat are of him struggling to meditate crosslegged in our chaotic lounge, his white face panstick-ed and giggling hysterically, very loud Jungle on the sound system. We'd Hoover round him, trying to distract him even more.

I plan for his funeral, and I look out a suitably neat and ladylike handbag. It won't do to lug my usual gargantuan bag, in its jolly orange hue. I check through the temporary bag and find a few things in its depths - a reel of black thread, a tape measure and a Post-It note, which I turn over and read:
"Funeral List: Black dress, tights (2 prs), nude shoes, cardigan, speech"
I realise the last outing for this bag was a funeral, my mother's. I'm a bit startled by the list - it's spare, uncharacteristically neat and orderly. "Wasn't I distraught, bereft?" I think "How come I managed to - for once - make a list??"

When I get to the crematorium for X's funeral, and squeeze in behind the rows of his family. Though it's been years, I recognise each one of them by the shape of their shoulders, now hunched and stiff with suppressed emotion and purpose. X's mother gets through her eulogy somehow, returns to her seat clasping her notes. She's holding it together better than anyone else in the room. Then it's X's brother's turn, he reads from his iPhone, voice faltering and yet he raises much laughter in the crowd, reminiscing about much boyhood bad behaviour. Then a close friend delivers a brilliant and brave speech, explicitly acknowledging that X's death had been a brutal suicide, and eloquently describing this act's emotional ambivalence for all those who thought they knew him best. People are beginning to cry a lot now, and still X's family hold their nerve. I remember this well from Mum's funeral - you're so glad to have something to do, a role, that it's a relief to have a schedule, a list, a speech in your hand. After a death, however it came about, the haunting of those of us left behind, starts in earnest. Could I have done more, stopped this? Will I feel any different, better, tomorrow? So the distracting work of the funeral is welcome. Even a secular service, like this, has much to busy yourself with.

The final music of the service, 'Nature Boy' is devastatingly evocative of the 'very strange, enchanted boy' present in all our memories. I can't bear to think of how it ended - the violence, the pain that must have engulfed him.

After the service, the dazed crowd mingles outside in the wintery afternoon sun, browsing the floral tributes and organising taxis and lifts to the pub where the wake is to be. I'm struck - not for the first time - by the warmth of strangers at times like these, as we realise and are glad that we were all parts of X's world, and that we aren't strangers anymore. It feels odd but welcome to be recognising old friends here, catching up, raising a smile through our puffy and teary faces.

When I eventually reach X's father to offer my condolences, he recognises me instantly. He smiles and hugs me, then suddenly crumples against me, weeping. We stay like that for what feels like a long time, and I realise that I have unwittingly taken him back in time, to when his youngest son was that boy, that strange, enchanted boy with his uncharted life stretching limitlessly ahead of him.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Two years exactly since Mum's death, and I spend a solitary weekend on the kind of pursuits that filled most of her life - Gardening, baking, sewing, cleaning cupboards, fruit-picking and making jam. She wraps herself around my every task, especially in the kitchen - her natural domain. I hear her chide my disorganised worktop, she slurps the foam from the jam-spoon with relish, checks my jars are clean, worries about the set.

I haven't written down much lately, apart from lists and administrative emails. Lots of them.
But the writing-in-my-head hasn't stopped, though 'The Closer We Get' - where it all went for 4 years - is done and dusted and out in the world now.

And that feels very strange, and rather sad. Where should all those thoughts on grief and bereavement, joy and wonder, go now? In Julian Barnes' fine book, 'Levels of Life' - written in the aftermath of his wife's death - he divides the world absolutely, thus - when we are young, by those who have had sex and those who haven't. And then - usually, though not always, later - into those who have grieved the death of a loved one. And those who haven't. Yet, that is.
Perhaps I am now in Barnes' own farther-flung category - those who have shown the world that grief, for a while.

Both the significant and insignificant things I inherited from Mum are now embedded in my domestic and working landscapes, like a matrix of archaeological finds suspended in insignificant mud. But only I would know them as special - I dry my hands on an old striped towel I rescued from her house as we emptied it, I cook with a packet of cornflour from her cupboard, I swallow a vitamin pill from a bottle she began, use her German stapler on my desk.

Mum shared my passion for plants and gardens. In fact it was our strongest bond in my wayward teenage years when we could barely speak to each other civilly, and yet could happily visit the local garden centre for hours together, a boot-full of plants and a treacle scone in the tearoom to recover from the array of choice. She insisted she lacked expertise as a gardener, and yet she effortlessly grew enormous, slug-free clumps of some of the choicest plants we found together. She always deferred to my tastes when it came to her garden, perhaps regretting it at times. I remember a year or so before she died, she told me, from her wheelchair parked up at the window, 'I really miss that wee patch of lawn we dug up, you know".
For over a year after Mum's death, gardening - which I'd done so habitually since childhood that I wouldn't even call it a 'hobby', to me it was just something I always did a great deal of - meant suddenly very, very little to me. The ebullience of nature felt like an affront, how dare it return? Gradually though, we have found each other again, and I take pleasure in the imaginary chats I have now with Mum as I garden - she'd 'shoot the boots off that cat' who's done its business in the border, and she'd certainly have those goosegogs in the freezer by now.

I find this plant label (pictured above) at regular intervals during my sessions in the garden now, and it always stops me in my tracks. Somehow I don't want to 'save' it indoors, I want it to live the ad-hoc life it should have had, a life of insignificance, not the life of a memorial. In Mum's neat hand-writing - note the 'dashed' number seven, another thing I inherited from her - a sowing of hardy annuals is recorded. I hope they came up, and I hope they were beautiful. Because 2007 would be the last summer before her stroke changed everything. Summer 2008 was spent in hospital, windows jammed shut, garage flowers at the end of the bed. The later ones were spent wheeled out onto the specially-modified deck at home, watching me fight back the ever-increasing wildness of the garden and murmuring appreciatively when I brought tiny cut flowers to her table for her close inspection.

Last summer, we planted a young tree in the churchyard garden in Mum's memory - a spot overlooked by the handsome big house that was our family home for over thirty years. It's not doing well, apparently, so out it must come. Mum would be unsentimental about such a thing. I think we should replace it with one from the garden centre up the road, the place that kept us together all those years ago. "Well, what on earth are you waiting for?!" I can hear Mum say impatiently.

Sunday, March 30, 2014

I’ve finally watched I Am Breathing, a feature documentary
directed by Emma Davie and Morag McKinnon, and it inspired me to write the Blog
entry below.

The film documents the last year or so of the life of Neil Platt, a
sufferer of Motor Neurone Disease, which also claimed Rose Finn-Kelcey
recently, an artist and inspiring former tutor of mine.

The film has been on my radar for ages, initially via our
mutual connection with the wonderful Scottish Documentary Institute and then
latterly because it’s simply been a huge and deserved success story of a film.

So why did it take me so long to watch it?

In a nutshell – because when you have just lived and filmed
an end-of-life story of your own (The Closer We Get) it doesn’t exactly make
you hungry for others. Even if you know they will be as life affirming,
charming, profound and damned important as I Am Breathing is, you find your
appetite veering off to some decidedly escapist film fare instead.

But, of course, the grief of bereavement will get you in the end whatever
you are watching. A few months ago I went to see the blockbuster Gravity in 3D,
in a small local cinema. I had popcorn and Coke in hand, I was expecting to
have fun. From almost the first instant, I was shocked to find myself weeping
behind my 3D glasses. It doesn’t take a psychotherapist to work out why – a
woman, alone, in a dark abyss, trying to fix something she knows probably can’t
be fixed.

So to endure I Am Breathing was hard for me. I managed to stay
dry-eyed until about half way through - not too shabby. Amongst the people around Neil is his
mother, an unimaginably brave woman who has survived the death of her husband
and now of her son from the same dreadful disease, as well as Neil’s wife and small
son.

So, it seems timely to publish this text about my mum Ann on
Mother’s Day, and to dedicate it to the two mothers Neil Platt left behind.

Ann & Karen playing Beauty Parlours

I am Feeling

Exhausted from digging a large plot in the vegetable garden
in early Spring, I lie down, utterly flat on the still compacted ground nearby.
How seldom I do this now, when as a teenager I think it was a near-daily occurrence,
even in the damp West Coast of Scotland. (If further evidence is sought, see
final scene of Gregory’s Girl, filmed up the road from my hometown and
featuring kids very like we were).

For a spell I gaze upwards into the clouds and the bluest of
skies, listlessly tracking the odd bird overhead and feeling the good, cold,
dense clods support my body’s form. My breathing slowing, my heaviness reminds
me of the body my mother inhabited for those last 5 years, inert bar for her
head and neck, and an ever-deteriorating right arm. I remember in the mornings the
carers manoeuvring it onto its edges, first one then the other, as solid as
clay, a deadweight which must be cleansed and dressed. As the women worked
across and along her limbs, my mother’s face held the expression of one who is
wondering about a barely perceptible distant sound – the vestigial nerves in
her flesh were relaying confused yet tangible sensations she could not quite place.
If something was uncomfortable to her, and it often was, she struggled to
describe to us how, choosing peculiar words like ‘tight’ and ‘soft’ in an
attempt to convey what this new relationship with her body felt like.

The sky above me suddenly darkened and sleet began to fall
on my face. It felt wonderful. In such moments when the natural world seems at
its most electrifyingly complete and beautiful and part of me and of all of us,
I always think of my mother and I usually cry. In a photograph of her as a
teenager walking on a beach with a dog, it’s evidently cold, windy weather as
she wears a big jumper and a headscarf. But her legs and feet are bare and her
face beams with the sensual joy and fun of cold sand and spray. Until her stroke
she retained this appetite for earthy pleasures - eating crusty bread, cycling
into the wind along the seafront, stroking a supine, sun-warmed cat.

So as I blink in the tumbling sleet, my tears find their
path of least resistance from the outer corners of my eyes, down my temples and
into my hair, their dampness instantly provoking shivering. I don’t wipe them.
Mum very seldom wept after her stroke, it was a very grave sign if she did, but
when it happened she could not wipe them, could not lift her hand, and so if I
was there I would oblige. But what of the times – there must have been some
–when I was not there?

After the stroke, Mum’s short spell in physiotherapy ended
with a tacit acceptance that this once sprightly woman, the kind of woman that
rarely sat down for long, would be wheelchair bound for the rest of her life.
Her damaged eyesight meant a self-drive chair would be impossible. Along with
the myriad other dependencies (personal care, feeding, medication, dressing)
she was also, suddenly and forever, unable to autonomously decide where she
would be and when. After a few months of our caring routine kicking in, I began noticing
how listless Mum could become with the clockwork carers visits, the porridge
and lukewarm tea, the endless daytime television in the over warm lounge. Her
bright blue eyes literally clouded over for days at a time.

What brought back her sparkle was always something
unexpected and invariably something sensory, so I became adept at inventing and
stage-managing as many of these as I could fit in to her waking hours, and
sometimes also into the hours where she was meant to be sleeping but often
wasn’t: Whether it was sharing a fruity face-pack or a blast of loud music with
our terrible vocal accompaniment, feeding her a very ripe mango or a very salty
chip, manoeuvring a furry cuddle from the longsuffering cat Jack, a cold skoosh
of Rive Gauche on her neck, an illicit chocolate eaten in bed or a noseful of
fragrant sweet peas.

Occasionally these energising episodes also happened without so much pre-planning by me: Shortly after Mum had been returned home from the
hospital, we decided to pay a visit an old friend of hers, now residing in a
large old peoples home along the coast road. At this stage I’d not yet got used
to the fandango of getting Mum into her coat, hat and gloves whilst she was
already seated in her wheelchair. But she was patient and after about twenty
minutes manipulating awkward limbs and digits and with me in a light sweat by
now, I had swaddled her from head to toe and we careered our way out of the
house and the close and onto the deserted street. I should have recognised what
the peculiar soundlessness and pallor of the day foretold, but keen to reach
the beachside ‘Prom’ which had been a daily landmark of her entire adult life I
pushed the chair onwards at speed, Mum occasionally complaining good-naturedly
over the potholes encountered en route.

Doris, our hostess, was a big, robust woman some ten years older than Mum and suffering
from dementia. In her small, neat room, I loosened Mum’s layers and listened in
to their conversation, smiling benignly. Doris was convinced that Mum and her
had been Wrens in the War together, and no matter how often Mum reminded her of
their actual relationship – Mum had been an occasional cleaner and housekeeper
for Doris – Doris’ mind would wander off to those wartime escapades she was
certain they’d shared. Occasionally Doris would turn to me and speak as if Mum
wasn’t there – “She was a gifted telephone operator, you know’. I could not
help reflecting on the odd couple they seemed – each with infirmities at such odds
with what remained.

What if Mum had that fit and strong body of Doris’, and
Doris could adopt the alert and perceptive mind Mum still had?

We left Doris in time to speed back along the Prom in time
for the carers’ mid afternoon home visit, and almost as soon as we were
parallel to the pewter gray sea the sky whitened dramatically. A blizzard began
and within minutes enveloped us to a dramatic degree – we could barely see 5
metres ahead. By now I was almost running behind the wheelchair, terrified that
Mum would be scared and confused, or at the very least rather cross with me for
getting us into this mess. Bellowing over the chair handles, I assured her we’d
be home in no time, who on earth would have guessed this snow was on its way,
etc etc. Snow clung to our every surface, it wasn’t so much falling as
propelling itself horizontally onto us. Every hundred metres or so I stopped
the chair, dashed round to the front and readjusted Mum’s hat, scarf and collar
so that barely her nose and eyes were open to the elements. With every pit stop
she was giggling more, until be the end of the journey we were both howling
with laughter.

When we finally reached home the carers were already indoors,
more than mildly concerned as to our whereabouts given the extreme weather.
They gently scolded me for being caught out in that with Mum, but as they
removed her layers and the fast melting snowflakes we caught each other’s eye and shared a deeply conspiratorial smile.

Much of this film was inspired by writing here in this modest Blog, and getting the occasional lovely message of support from this audience - here has always felt like a good place, where I wasn't writing for work, or because I was obliged to. I always wrote here because I wanted to, and the result is a sort of diary of my last few years, of much sorrow but of some joy too.

And this is what has become The Closer We Get. So I thank you Blogger :-)

I'm biased of course, but I think it's an important film that I encourage you to support, especially if like me you have found yourself suddenly in a family 'car crash', reconfiguring your life and beliefs after something earth shatteringly dreadful has happened.

For everyone who has survived that, and for everyone who will have to in the future, this is a film that must be made. So please - come and be part of that with me.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Ah, Christmas in your hometown. Twenty odd years ago I might have been that girl outside this bedroom window at 3am, making a bit too much racket en route back to her parents' - to late, too many drinks, too high heels, too many school friends to catch up with in the three day (and three long nights) festive home visit.

Now I don't seem to know any of my school friends any more. At least not outside Facebook.I was rather too good at making a life elsewhere for myself, and perhaps they smelled my arrogant derision for this place, the home town that had formed us all, and that I was too good, too interesting for - or so I thought.

Occasionally now I'm in the local Tesco and I suddenly recognise a familiar face from a gym class, a choir rehearsal or a school dinner queue - but now it seems to be set in an overweight and hurried middle aged person - shopping or behind the till. They are looking at me thinking the same, probably - don't I know that tired woman from somewhere?

How did we all get like this? And have they been in our town all those years since school - and if so, doing what? How come I didn't I notice them before, on those annual visits I used to make when all was well and my parents' were conveniently (for us kids) trapped in middle age. Or have they too come back here because of family woe, a private tragedy like ours, something that somehow marks their face and demeanour and makes it recognisable to me again - a mark of some kind, that we afflicted daughters and sons share?

So there's no time off or social distraction from the parents and the house now, and anyhow there's far too much to do here now.
As kids our pre-Christmas calendar was a delicious cycle of homemade tree decorations, carol concerts, un-PC telly comedy and revising lists of what we wanted from Santa. My sister had a talent for wrapping gifts, my hand writing was deemed good enough for the tags. After homework on long December nights we were tasked with sorting the many gifts our family would buy for our nine cousins and all our many aunts and uncles (great and otherwise). Our (real of course) tree was always a breathtaking and magical spectacle in our playroom bay window, and it was a stolen night time treat to kneel silently on the edge of the vast pool of gifts beneath it, inhaling its delicious scent and believing that surely every Christmas for the rest of your life would be this wondrous. My father's huge, stripy rugby socks were hung up on Christmas Eve, four in a row on the mantelpiece. On Christmas morning we would often swear to each other we'd glimpsed Santa's sleigh in the sky as we'd struggled to stay awake, and we always seemed to have literally piles of gifts, plus the obligatory tangerine in the sock toe. Great Auntie Minnie (our ersatz grannie) and her brother Uncle Robert (a cantankerous old Capstan-smoker) would join our family of six for Christmas dinner, our grandparents having long since died. I was an adult before I had the very straightforward realisation that Robert WAS my grandfather in fact, having been Mum's adoptive father. For some reason Minnie had always seemed the important one, the do-er (a feminine traie in our family) and Robert was so repellant to us and so it also seemed to Mum, that I literally failed to make the connection. It wasn't concealed, it just didn't fit my world view that we could be in any way related to such a man.

One of my strongest Christmas memories is however one of disappointment, albeit of a rather hilarious and very Scottish sort. We four kids all raced down one Christmas morning - I think it was 1978 - to find an impeccable child-scale golf bag replete with clubs, under each stocking. The disappointment was crushing - I'd asked Santa for a Girl's World after all (a rather grotesque doll's heads you put makeup on) and had less than zero interest in fulfilling Dad's ambition that I would one day become Scotland's Ladies Golf Champion. The only aspect of this gift I appreciated was that the leatherette of my bag was the very ginger shade of my hair. After examining these woeful presents for a brief spell, my oldest brother Mark turned to us and confessed that he'd found them under our parents' bed weeks ago. And he'd known it would be best to spare us the news and let us keep our Christmas hopes up. Bless him.

Five Christmases ago we'd only just extracted Mum from hospital some six months after her devastating stroke. In the family photo taken after the Christmas dinner, she still wears her cracker hat, poised and regal in her wheelchair, having managed to feed herself her meal. And boy had she eaten. I didn't know then that they starve the elderly in hospital. Not on purpose, but with every discharge since she has been literally famished for weeks. So the event was something of a milestone.

I don't honestly think I expected her to make another 4 Christmases on top of that one, so it's not surprising I'm feeling a little maudlin now. Today I cooked the meal at her house solo for the first time, the baton having been passed around a few siblings and venues before resting with me. My father, my brothers Mark and Campbell, Mum and me ate together - Mum can no longer travel far enough to enjoy a dinner elsewhere. This time, Mum reclined in her vast bespoke lounge chair, a little vacant and under the weather. I positioned myself beside her, where I could split my attention between our plates. Mum's appetite was modest this time, and she can no longer feed herself anything more complex than a bread stick. The atmosphere of the event struggled to rise, alcohol helped eventually as did stories about the family Chuck Berry cassette (one of only 5 our father ever possessed) and our pets. The men all ate my feast very rapidly (and who knows, perhaps appreciatively - they don't say much, the men I'm related to) while I seesaw-ed between Mum's plate and mine, swapping cutlery and bite sizes.

Mark had made a very decent cold dessert, which vied with the traditional pudding, but shortly afterwards he vanished upstairs. Working nights, he has a very odd body clock. Or maybe he just wanted to avoid the washing up. Which he did - he always was a clever boy.

Saturday, November 26, 2011

This weekend I've submitted myself to a Meditation Retreat at a local Buddhist Centre, part of the tedious journey of personal development afflicting all middle youth like me.It's not in fact much of a retreat for me, as I'm an outpatient, sleeping and eating at home and twiddling my thumbs during the generous tea breaks provided in the daily sessions. Twiddling ones thumbs in a Buddhist Centre in fact means eating a lot of the not especially healthy but vegetarian foods that seems to be favoured by the Buddhists, slouching on sofas and wandering in the mud of the lovely if unkempt grounds.

The apparatus of the North Wing Meditation Room is the same shrill, corporate blue of the local kerbside recycling boxes: we don't kneel or sit cross-legged, instead we sit on a conference-style chair with a matching blue foot cushion. Unfortunately this (relative) comfort leads to many of us novices sleeping instead of enjoying a 'journey out of our transparent skins made of light' and it is the distraction of the surrounding snoring that in fact is my meditative undoing. The aesthetics of the place fascinate me: a significant and vast mid 19th C mansion dotted with huge Buddha casts and paintings, each with its offering of packeted vegetarian foodstuffs in front. One could eat for a year from these - I wonder what happens to those rice cakes, the elderflower cordial, the halva when they are past the sell-by date? A resident lay Buddhist gives us a tour but it seems an idiotic question to ask. Nevertheless it's a fascinating day: Fat is not a Buddhist issue: the monks' robes are - after all - one size fits all, and they freely admit that the banning of stimulants and alcohol leads to a love of chocolate and cake. Most course attendees are women of a certain age and a certain size, so we are all compatible. The state of the gardens attest to a certain lack of physical activity as the Buddhist norm - ah, the limited power of prayer when it comes to weeding.

Our main teaching monk resembles Lenny Henry, except that she has a natural gift for comedy. At one juncture in the soothing babble about business of mind and meditative objects she mentions her predilection for meditating on rhubarb, for the reason that it so repels her and thus offers her a suitably potent meditative focus. I'm there more for the eyes-shut meditation than the Buddhist theory, which in any case seems only gently promoted (noone speaks above a loud whisper here). The exception is a singalong to a dreadful dirge written by the Centre's founder that punctuates the day. It reminds me of then Church tried to go cool in the late 70's (in some places - like Coniston - it got stuck there) - long hair, guitars, songs not hymns etc. The Founder Monk should have stuck to the day job of promoting world peace, for sure. All I recall is that this Buddhist version of 'All things bright and beautiful' includes the line 'My body is a wish fullfilling jewel' and that we were required to sing (most of us whisper in embarrasment) along with a backing tape at least twice before meditation. Clearly if you know the song by heart - as the monks did - this in itself becomes a kind of sung meditation, as they are no longer squinting at a laminated songsheet with typos, as we novices were. To them this song can become abstract, ritualistic, reassuringly timeless. Oddly this song is our only shared sound and I find myself wishing from some kind of group 'Ommmm' to drown out the snores, coughs, yawns and wheezes that so put me off.

Finally I'm reminded of a recent visit to the church I attended all through my youth, now with my frail mum in her wheelchair. Despite her illness and fading memory, and though it was nearly 25 years since the sung service was a weekly part of my life, we both sailed through the complex Episcopalian Communion bits and bobs, neither of us needing the booklet (which she can no longer read anyway). I can now see that this might be as close to meditation as I've ever been - the confident ritual, the beauty of the language and music, its familiarity cleansing the mind and even offering the body some relief in the gentle seesaw of kneeling and standing. My hand rested on my mother's shoulder as she repeated softly 'Take, eat, this my body, it is broken for you'. The power of these words melded with my intimate physical sense of her - somehow still robust - won't ever leave me.